Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political
Science at the University of Florida, and the author of a book
manuscript in progress, tentatively entitled Globalizing the
Ethnoscape: Nature and National
Identity after Communism.

“What is a nation? ... A nation is a
historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on
the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and
psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”1

Thus did Joseph Stalin confidently weigh in on one of the most
vexed ongoing scholarly debates of the modern era, “qu’est-cequ’une nation?”2

Not
content to be simply the architect of Soviet totalitarianism,
Stalin also fancied himself the “Coryphaeus of science,” and his
substantial 1913 essay on “Marxism and the National Question”
represents only one of his numerous contributions to various
learned disciplines. It is, however, perhaps the best-known
among them, and indeed was deemed a sufficiently important
scholarly intervention on the topic to be included in a
definitive recent reader on nationalism.3

This
historical curiosity-a serious academic meditation on the
definition of nationhood by the man who, as People’s Commissar
for Nationalities, would be instrumental in designing the USSR
as an “affirmative action empire” for nations, before going on
to orchestrate quasi-genocidal atrocities against more than one
nation-is one reason why the theme of nations and nationalism in
the Soviet Union and its successor states makes for such a
compelling teaching topic.

I designed a
“Special Topics” course entitled “Nation, State, and Identity in
(Post-)Soviet Politics” and taught it
in two consecutive semesters during academic year 2001–2002 as a
lecturer in the political science department at Penn State
University. Nowadays, many political science departments offer
only one general course in Russian and/or Soviet politics.
Having just finished teaching such a course myself at the
University of Florida, I know just how hard (dare I say
impossible) it is to do justice to the complexities of both the
Soviet period and the post-Soviet “triple transition” in a
single semester. A course focusing on the national dimension of
Soviet and post-Soviet politics offers one way of complementing
this general course, allowing exploration of the tremendous
cultural diversity of the “Soviet people,” which otherwise may
be given short shrift in the struggle to cover the basics.

From a thematic
perspective, moreover, the former Soviet Union is an ideally
suited regional case-almost tailor-made, really-for teaching
about nationalism. The USSR, after all, was a multi-national
empire built by people who thought a great deal about nations.
Lenin as well as Stalin wrote about national identity and its
relationship to class identity, state-building, and imperialism.
This was an empire designed on the basis of a very consciously
articulated, if wonderfully paradoxical, theory about
nationhood.

Believing that a temporary tactical concession to
nationalism was necessary to win the support of the oppressed
peoples within the tsarist empire’s “prison-house of nations,”
Lenin and Stalin set out toward the goal of Marxist
internationalism by first seeking to bolster national
consciousness among those peoples, and indeed to create nations
out of the more “backward” peoples by supplying those essential
elements of nationhood (according to Stalin’s above-quoted
definition) that were lacking: written languages, history books,
song and dance ensembles, and defined national territories.

Nationalism would initially be harnessed to build legitimacy for
socialism, but ultimately socioeconomic modernization would
erode national differences and merge the nations into a single,
supra-national “Soviet people.” Thus the world’s first state
built on the ideology of internationalism became its first
ethnically defined federation. This extraordinary
nation-building and nation-destroying project provides a
fascinating empirical illustration of questions of how and why
national identity is created, sustained, or eroded, and of the
role of states in these processes.

In the
post-Soviet period, the successor states provide a rich set of
comparative cases in which the shared historical legacies of
tsarist and Soviet imperial rule can be juxtaposed against the
diversity of recent trajectories. From Riga to Almaty, the
post-Soviet umbrella allows us to explore almost every
analytical issue in the study of nationalism: the ways in which
national identity is constructed and contested by politicians,
intellectuals, and publics; the relationships between titular
nations and national minorities; the politics of language rights
and citizenship; the role of religion in nation-building;
communal violence; separatism and
ethnoterritorial conflict; and so on. Post-Soviet space
also presents a unique opportunity to explore the “triadic
politics” that emerged from the disintegration of an
asymmetrical ethnic federation: the complex relationships, that
is, between new nationalizing states, the old (Soviet) homeland
state, and the new national minorities that found themselves
suddenly “beached” on foreign soil.4

Perhaps the
biggest challenge for me in structuring this course lay in
providing enough background-both conceptual background on
nations and nationalism, and historical background on the
Russian Empire and the Soviet Union-to make the course material
comprehensible without eating up too much of the semester. The
first part of the course (three and a half weeks of a 14-week
semester) was devoted to this effort.

Familiarizing students
with competing definitions and theories of the emergence of
nation and nationalism is no easy task, especially given the
deeply-entrenched conceptual conflation of “nation” and “state”
in both popular and scholarly American discourse, as well as the
shocking lacuna on nationalism in many general political science
texts.5 To address at least some of the analytical
diversity, I assigned several very short excerpts from John
Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith’s 1994 reader on nationalism.
Along with Stalin’s quintessentially objectivist definition, we
read classic statements by Connor, Renan,
Breuilly, Deutsch,
Geertz, and
Hroch (not included in the reader). In lectures, I
attempted to introduce the debates between
primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist
theories of nation formation, presenting also the arguments of
Benedict Anderson, Gellner,
Hroch, and
Hobsbawm and Ranger on the “invention of tradition.” (I
assigned excerpts from some of these authors the first time I
taught the course, but decided they were too complex for
students to grapple with in such a compressed way.

I should note
that in choosing readings, I was heavily constrained by my
department chair’s prudent warning not to assign more than 100
pages of reading per week at the utmost.) Given its centrality
to the nationalisms of Eastern Europe, I also briefly addressed
Herder’s cultural-linguistic articulation of nationalist
ideology.6The next three
class periods provided an obviously very sketchy overview of the
Russian Empire in general, nationalities issues in the empire,
and Marxism. Here I used brief excerpts from Walker Connor (in
the reader), from Ronald Grigor Suny’s
The Soviet Experiment, and from Gregory Gleason’s Federalism and
Nationalism.7

The second part
of the course addressed “The Making of (Post-)Soviet
Nationalities,” beginning with a two-period attempt to explain
“What was the Soviet Union?” I assigned the best short overview
I am aware of: Mary McAuley’s Soviet
Politics 1917-1991.8 (I ordered the book for
purchase, although I only assigned the first half-through
Stalinism-as required reading.) After providing this necessarily
cursory overview of the revolution, formation of the Leninist
party-state, totalitarianism, collectivization and forced
industrialization, and Stalinist terror, I addressed the two
contradictory faces of Soviet nationalities policy:
ethnofederalism and nation-building,
on the one hand, and national repression and
russification, on the other. I
assigned only one reading for this section: Yuri Slezkine’s very
comprehensive 1994 Slavic Review article.9This section ended with the fatal
contradiction between empire and nation-building, and the role
of nationalism in the Soviet collapse. I assigned chapter four
of Suny’s The Revenge of the Past.10
(The previous semester, I assigned the entire book, but I felt
that the chapters on the imperial period were somehow at once
too detailed and too schematic to be satisfying, at least with
this pool of undergraduate readers.) Bowing to my own research
interests, I supplemented Suny’s
general analysis with three short and accessible articles on the
“eco-nationalist” dimension of the breakdown.

Part Three moved
on to consider the successor states. Refining the syllabus the
second time around, my task was made easier by the discovery of
Pal Kolsto’s excellent book,
Political Construction Sites, an eminently readable
undergraduate text.11 Supplemented by several
articles, the Kolsto text allowed me
to cover many, although certainly not all, dimensions of
national politics in the successor states. After introducing the
notion of “triadic politics” between Russia, the newly
independent states, and the Russophonediasporas, we took up the two most
strongly binational successor
states, Latvia and Kazakstan, to
explore the politics of language and citizenship.

Forms of
ethnoterritorial conflict were
investigated through cases from the southern Caucasus, Crimea,
and Moldova. I complemented Kolsto’s
text with Catherine Wanner’s
wonderfully vivid ethnographic study of Ukrainian nationalism,
Burden of Dreams.12 In addition to conveying
powerfully a sense of what daily life was like in Soviet and
post-Soviet times, this book explores, in a very readable way,
the role of the state in cultivating national identity through
various sites of nationalization: history-writing,
commemorations, festivals, schools, and urban landscapes.

This
book won the highest approval ratings in student evaluations
both semesters. I was also fortunate to have the author herself
on campus and available for guest lectures. This part of the
course concluded with a topic unfortunately not covered by
Kolsto: the relationship between
religion and nationhood in the Islamic regions of the former
USSR.

The final
section took up the struggles of the Russian Federation to
define and defend its national identity, membership, and borders
in a (reluctantly) post-imperial context.
Kolsto provides a decent overview of the competing
approaches by Russian politicians and intellectuals to the
question “What is Russia and who are
Russians?” - including civic
nationalism, ethnocultural Slavic
nationalism, neo-imperialist Great Russian nationalism, and
Eurasianism. We wrapped up by
considering the centripetal and centrifugal forces acting upon
Russia’s ethnoterritorial
federation, using the contrasting cases of Tatarstan and its
bilaterally negotiated “sovereign” status within Russia, and
Chechnya, the federation’s sole instance of secessionism. This
is another critical topic not covered by the
Kolsto text, and so I again selected
a number of articles.

I showed
documentary films whenever appropriate, including Robert
Conquest’s Harvest of Despair (1984) on the Ukrainian famine,
excerpts from JurisPodnieks’ Soviets (1988) on ethnic
tensions in the last days of the Soviet Union, and a 30-minute
film on the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia called The New
Iron Curtain (1997).

There are of course a great many other
films that could be used, if available; for example, the
Ukrainian segment of Michael Ignatieff’s
series Blood and Belonging would be a useful complement to
Wanner’s book. After only two
iterations, my syllabus is still very clearly a work in
progress. And thanks to the rapid pace of events in the region,
it is obviously already outdated. The last two years have seen
the publication of important new books that could serve well in
this class: Mark Beissinger’s Nationalist Mobilization and the
Collapse of the Soviet State, Matthew Evangelista’s The Chechen
Wars, and Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire, to name
but a few.13 What has not changed is the salience of
“the national question” in the politics of the post-Soviet
region, and the usefulness of this region for teaching about
nationalism.

4. Rogers Brubaker, “Nationhood and the
national question in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Eurasia:
an institutionalist account,” Theory
and Society 23 (1994), pp. 47-72.

5. For example, the textbook I used to
teach introductory comparative politics this past year at the
University of Florida, which has been used extensively within my
department in recent years, devotes literally one page to the
topic of nations and nationalism. Judging from the other texts I
have looked at, this is by no means unusual. However, for next
year I have found a book that devotes an entire chapter to
“States and nations: nationalism-nation building-
supra-nationalism,” as well as a chapter on “Ideology.” This is
Michael J. Sodaro, Comparative
Politics: A Global Introduction (Boston: Mc-Graw
Hill, 2004).

6. Ultimately, the overview of nationalism
theory may have been the most frustrating portion of the course.
In the hopes of elucidating this difficult theoretical material
by encouraging students to apply it to their own lived
experience, the first assignment asked them to write a short
essay (3-4 pages) on the question, “Is America a nation?” I
instructed them to “begin with a clearly stated theory of what a
nation is, and of how national identity is formed,” using the
assigned readings to construct an argument and counter-argument.
Unfortunately, quite a few of the students appeared entirely
unable to process this question analytically, offering responses
along the lines of “Not only is America a nation, but it is the
greatest nation in the world..” The
problem was undoubtedly aggravated by the timing, as the
post-9/11 mood of flag-waving patriotism was still extremely
strong.

7. Ronald Grigor
Suny’s The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the
successor states (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Gregory Gleason, Federalism and Nationalism: the struggle for
republican rights in the USSR (Boulder: Westview, 1990).